ShoeGuy: The Name Game

Arcane monikers for fleet footwear

"I also saw Idaten defined as god of the kitchen, looking after the provisions of the brotherhood."

No doubt from a pizza website. Makes sense, though. Speed and food, two things runners everywhere know and love. Good work, Jim.

"Perhaps this is an origin to the phrase ‘he’s really cooking’ when someone is running fast." OK, Jim, that’ll do.

ASICS didn’t come by the name "Kinsei" easily. The shoe had various working identities during its five years in development. The typical timeline for running shoes from drawing board to store shelves is only 18 months, so that plus the tony $165 price tag should tell you something. Kinsei had better be a name as good as the shoe.

Before it was the Kinsei, it was the Gel Onitsuka, named for the guy who founded the company back in the 1940s. After working on the project for about a year, the development team switched the working name to Gel Ichiban, which is Japanese for "number one."

Four years later, just before the shoe was paraded in front of ShoeGuys across the land last spring, Ichiban became Kinsei, which is Japanese for "golden star." I guess you can’t get more number one than that.

Nike has resorted many times over the years to characters from Greek mythology in naming shoes, but Cesium has roots not found in tales of gods, heroes, and great feats. It came out of a chemistry lab.

Cesium is a chemical element, atomic number 55 on your periodic table hit parade. No, I didn’t learn this in high school chemistry many years ago. I managed to avoid that class as efficiently as most of the girls in high school avoided me.

My source on all things cesium are the nice folks at EnvironmentalChemistry.com, a website dedicated to making "the subject of chemistry a little less daunting to the average student." Which means I’ll have to work harder.

It seems that the element cesium is "used as a ‘getter’ to remove air traces in vacuum tubes."

Remove Air? Hardly a good name for a Nike shoe, especially one with famous Nike Zoom Air (not on the periodic table) inside its midsole. As usual, there’s more.

"Since [cesium] ionizes readily, it is used as an ion rocket motor propellant."

OK, that’s better. While I don’t know what it means to ionize, much less do it readily, I do know the significance of rocket motor propellant.

The Nike Air Cesium is not, however, a racing shoe. It is instead a stability shoe for the "moderate to severe overpronator." How that ties into a rocket propellant is beyond me, but then chemistry was always beyond me, too. That’s why I’m a ShoeGuy and not a rocket scientist.

As sure as these new models will be discontinued one day, there will always be another season and other new shoes. Their makers, however, will be hard-pressed to top names like Idaten, Kinsei and Cesium. My suggestion would be to consider Larry, Moe and Curly, or maybe Shadrack, Meshack and Abednego.